Have you heard the phrase “you have to spend money to make money”?
When it comes to growing your practice, that’s more accurate than ever. That’s because today’s landscape offers more options for cosmetic surgery, and patients and consumers are more inundated with information than ever before. Patients considering cosmetic or other optional surgeries believe – or at least perceive – that they have several choices to meet their needs. In these cases, savvy doctors need to stand out from the crowd using effective marketing. What sort of investment does a practical marketing plan require? The size of your budget will depend on a variety of factors such as the size and age of your practice, the location, the services you provide, and goals. Here’s a few ideas on the money you can expect to spend up front, and on an ongoing basis.
One-time expenses
One rule of thumb is that a young practice should contribute about 10 percent of revenue to marketing. However, when you’re first starting out, you’ll need to set up things that help you carve out a name for your practice. New practices can expect to spend about $20 – 30,000 on activities like branding and website development, logo creation, collateral, and investing in a marketing automation platform.
Ongoing marketing budget
After the initial investments, you will spend a certain amount per year on marketing. This amount will vary, for example, you won’t have the same budget in your second year of business as in your fifteenth. As your practice becomes more established your needs will evolve and that will affect your marketing budget. Working with credible partners in the marketing space will help you make the most of your budget. Here are a few ideas from our experts based on revenue figures.
- $0.5 million annual revenue – $2.5-3K/month budget. Focus on ppc advertising, Facebook ads, social media, email campaigns, and possibly one or two live events.
- $1 million annual revenue – $5-6K/month budget. You’ll expand your digital budget and host another event or two, while considering print options.
- $2 million annual revenue – $10-15K/month budget. Use analytics to expand channels that are working well, and reallocate from those that aren’t. Experiment with TV or billboards.
- $3-10 million annual revenue – $20-30K/month budget. Expand all of your successful campaigns, host up to 12 events, and consider making more investments in your physical presence (office renovations, signage).
These figures might sound like a lot of money. A proper marketing budget is certainly not insignificant. It’s important to shift your mindset from thinking about these costs as an expense, and more as an investment that will reward your practice with new patients and ongoing growth.
How to Know If Your Marketing Plan Is Working
Creating a marketing budget for your practice used to involve a lot of guesswork. Blindly throwing money at marketing and seeing what stuck was the norm. This trial and error approach is both expensive and ineffective. Now, doctors and practice managers are learning how to use the many tools available to them for creating a successful marketing budget. An ROI tracking tool that automatically tracks where each lead comes from, the revenue that resulted, and then compares this data against each ads’ specified marketing cost is a crucial tool to have in your marketing budget.
MyMedeads’s sophisticated reporting tools can generate a series of customizable and in-depth ROI reports to show how your marketing initiatives are paying off. Our marketing automation tools also help practices develop programs that nurture leads into paying patients, helping contribute to an even stronger marketing ROI. Contact us today for a free demo and see how MyMedLeads can help your practice achieve exponential growth in 2020.